There’s no surveillance video of the incident in which Jeffrey Epstein apparently hanged himself in a federal lockup in Lower Manhattan, law enforcement officials told The Post on Sunday.
Although there are cameras in the 9 South wing where the convicted pedophile was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, they are trained on the areas outside the cells and not inside, according to sources familiar with the setup there.
Pols who attended Sunday’s annual Dominican Day Parade in Manhattan demanded answers to the many questions surrounding Epstein’s Saturday morning death, which is being investigated by the FBI and the Justice Department.
“Something doesn’t smell right — and it’s not his dead body,” Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said.
Adams noted the July 23 incident in which the multimillionaire financier was found nearly unconscious in his cell with marks on his neck, as well as the blockbuster court papers that were released on Friday and contained the names of other men — including former Maine Sen. George Mitchell and ex-New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson — who allegedly slept with an Epstein teenage “sex slave.”
“Something is really troubling about that and I think it needs to be investigated extremely and very thoroughly to make sure there wasn’t any foul play,” Adams said.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who said she’s toured the MCC, said she found it “very difficult to understand how something like this could have happened.”
“My understanding is that he should have been on suicide watch and the people on suicide watch are placed in a type of jumpsuit that wouldn’t allow them to hurt themselves or others,” she said.
Federal prison officials violated normal procedures by leaving Epstein, 66, alone without a cellmate and not checking on him every 30 minutes the night before he was found, according to a report Sunday.
In addition, both of the guards overseeing the unit were working overtime, with one on his fifth straight day of extra hours and the other forced to remain on duty, the New York Times said.
Bob Hood, a former chief of internal affairs for the Bureau of Prisons, told the Times that it was “beyond me” why Epstein was taken off a 24-hour suicide watch following the July 23 incident, especially given the steady stream of humiliating news reports about him.
“A man is dead. The Bureau of Prisons dropped the ball. Period,” Hood said.